Many electronic devices, such as personal computers, workstations, computer servers, mainframes and other computer-related equipment, including printers, scanners and hard disk drives, make use of memory that provides a large data storage capability, while attempting to incur low power consumption. One type of memory that is well suited for use in the foregoing devices is the dynamic random access memory (DRAM).
The demand for memory devices having increased capacity in large multi-processor systems continues to rise as chip size limitations provide a limiting influence. The surface area occupied by the components of individual memory cells has been steadily decreased so that the packing density of the memory cells on a semiconductor substrate can be increased along with the gate delays being decreased. However, shrinking the device surface area can result in reducing manufacturing yield, as well as increasing the complexity for interconnects used to connect the numerous banks of memory devices with other devices such as processors. Additionally, during miniaturization, interconnect delays do not scale as well as gate delays.